Articles

Adherents
of the medical model of human misery were quickly out of their trenches to
fight their cause following Tim O’Malley’s declaration in the Irish Medical
News. Mr O’Malley stated ‘that
there’s a strong view with a lot of people that depression and mental illness
is not a medical condition, that it’s part of life events that people get
depressed or just unhappy. Years
ago people were unhappy, they weren’t depressed, they weren’t given the name of
depressed.’ Whilst I agree that a
label never accurately describes an individual’s deep distress, the reality is
that individuals do experience considerable inner turmoil and urgently need
help to resolve it. Each person’s turmoil is unique and it is for that reason
in my own professional practice that each person receives a different therapy,
uniquely tailored to their inner and outer circumstances. Labelling loses sight of the
individual, and furthermore, psychiatric labelling offers no hope to the individual. Typically, the medical understanding of
a person’s distressing psychological and social symptoms is that it is
biological in nature and that life-time medication is the only answer. This is patently untrue, but its effect
is that persons so labelled and without hope attempt suicide, because what is
the point in going on if there is no hope for the future. Mr O’Malley’s declaration has thrown
down the gauntlet to the psychiatric profession, but this challenge has been
there for many decades. Back in
the 1970’s a psychiatrist called Thomas Saasz declared that ‘mental illness is
a myth’ and that equating depression and paranoia with medical conditions such
as cancer and diabetes had long outlived its usefulness. Indeed, it is now being recognised
within medicine itself that conditions like cancer, diabetes, heart disease are
psycho-somatic in nature and that a
holistic therapeutic response is required to restore the person’s
wellbeing! In America, fifty-one
per cent of psychiatrists consider, what has been traditionally seen as mental
illness, psycho-social conditions and
that the primary treatment needs to be psycho-social in nature. Peter Breggin, the author of Toxic
Psychiatry, a recent guest lecturer in Ireland, has carried the torch for a holistic
understanding of human distress for a number of decades. In Ireland, there have been two strong
voices that Mr O’Malley’s declaration echoes – Terry Lynch, General Medical
Practitioner, Psychotherapist and author of Beyond Prozac and Michael Corry,
Psychiatrist and Aine Tubridy, authors of Going Mad? Understanding Mental
Illness.

In my own
practice of thirty years, I have encountered every kind of human distress –
depression, violence, paranoia, mood swings, hallucinations, delusions, chronic
anxiety, anorexia nervosa, bulimia – and I never had any need to resort to a
medical explanation for these individual conditions. Contrary to what some people think, I have no difficulty
with the prescription of medication; my difficulty lies with the proscription?? The recent study by
Schizophrenia Ireland highlighted the debilitating side-effects of long-term
medication and the fact that fifty per cent of people stopped taking their
medication because of the limitations these drugs put on their living. It is often the case that the physical
straight-jacketing that was common in psychiatric hospitals has been replaced
by chemical straight-jacketing.
Some psychiatrists will point to the University of Pittsburgh research
on maintenance drug therapy, where in longitudinal studies, maintenance
medication was ‘proven’ to be vital in preventing reoccurrence of depressive ‘episodes’
(what an odd word!). In other
words, according to this research, if people take the appropriate medication
(the old dictum ‘take your medicine’), they have a far greater chance of not
becoming depressed again! There is
a major flaw in that conclusion, apart from the fact that long-term medication
considerably reduces quality of life.
The flaw is the notion that it is the failure to maintain one’s
medication that leads to a reoccurrence of the depression, hallucinations and
so on. The reason why inner and
outer turmoil reoccurs is that its causes and intentions have not been
considered and resolved and, inevitably, inner conflicts will arise again. Indeed, when conflicts are not truly
resolved, an intensification will occur in order to awaken the person and the
social system he or she is a member of to the resolutions that are required. The derogatory term ‘talking therapies’
used by Professor Patricia Casey, leading adherent of the medical model, does
no justice to the complexity and multiplicity of the interactions that arise in
psychotherapy, dynamic psychoanalysis, family therapy, group therapy and
therapeutic community initiatives.
What lies at the heart of non-medical approaches to human distress is relationship, arising from
well-grounded research by Alfred Adler, who developed his own relationship
approach (Adlerian psychotherapy) and many other researchers and
psychotherapists, that the cause of all human misery is a lack of loving.

Dr. Tony
Humphreys is a clinical psychologist and author of The Power of ‘Negative’
Thinking.